Anhedonic Treasure
by The Madmadam
Summary: "You lost your life long ago, and now you want death to be all yours," she said, taking briefly the form of a Daughter, then the form of Nefertari who stepped on your thigh, rolling her foot over your brittle femur with a placid visage. "I'll have your death, too, because you don't remember, and now there is no more you, and thus not a thing to be yours."


**Info that couldn't fit in the summary: this is a companion piece to Divided By Duty and a death fic. Consider thyself warned.**

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Finally, it had reached the day when you didn't remember how you got here. Suddenly blocks of dusty stone taller than you surrounded you. Blurs of faded colors. For some time you felt closer to Nefertari. But at this point, every corner you turned, it was impossible to forget the thousands of years that separated you.

You have both tried and tried not to hate her. Most of the time you couldn't bring yourself to do so, her being your ancestor. Now you didn't try at all. You have settled somewhere sluggish, contrite, and doleful, knowing your feelings cannot move a mummy.

You thought you would be happy to do something worthwhile, something without the help or association of your family. You thought getting away from the monotony of family life would free your heart.

But it didn't matter where you were.

It always came back for you.

It's come back hard now, now that you were dying.

You kept coming across letters a friend had written before she passed. And even though you were too weary to pick them up, they remained in your mind. You remembered how she kept smiling, long after you knew it was too late.

It fazed you a little. She was one of the few Daughters you actually liked.

Back in Cairo, people thought you were sad. Your husband asked why you wouldn't buck up. Your daughter asked why you didn't cry.

You weren't sad, not anymore. But when three old women came knocking on your door the chandelier in your heart ignited in a brilliant blaze. Then it was blown out altogether.

You didn't know what started it. Jamila was far too headstrong for her age, but she merely exhausted you. Your husband didn't bother you enough to be the one.

Your best guess was one whose name started with an F who sat at the helm of every person's life.

And even after that the chandelier never fell and shattered. It remained there hanging from every chain. Unlit. Empty. Opaque. No stars skipping along the walls as sons of crystal.

You were less feeling sadness than you were feeling the absence of joy. It was the latter that restricted the curve of your mouth through every dragging month.

You were too weary to cry.

In fact, you were too weary to do much of anything.

Your sphere of influence shrank until it bubbled pathetically around your fingers. Eventually it would rise up your arms when you lost mobility of them, settling in the shoulders, at which point you could wriggle, then finally sink back down and through the heart, at which point you would die.

And now you stood propped up against an outside wall.

Maybe you didn't have much control over anything anymore, but you would die standing.

That was as set in stone as any of Nefertari's curses.

It all went so nicely together, the inability to feel joy which smothered every instinct to recover, the not knowing where you were, the forward-focused peripherals of a state that disallowed you to focus on anything, mixing together in this blind haze that, you thought wryly to yourself, would make a great story someday.

Yet no matter how fitting it was, you should not have died here. You kept repeating it lamely to yourself. Your husband would not raise your child alone. Perhaps some could, but not the man you married. You soon discovered he had been married long before he met you, wearily eyeing the stacks of papers on his desk and the blanket smoothed over where he would have lain, night after night after night.

Suddenly you feel silly for turning your mind so fully to things that could not be changed. If your tongue weren't so swollen, you'd probably be muttering pathetically. Thank Allah that tongue somehow preserved your dignity.

You were never coming back. No use thinking of people living a world away from you.

Especially since you owed Nefertari more.

Over each of her curses Fate had signed your name with your fingers.

Twenty years ago you scoffed at those who let Fate rule their lives. Even now you'd have liked to believe in willpower, but your body would not obey.

Not when everything that used to be important to you skittered just out of reach, gleaming at you like a thousand winks. You were dismayed to see your daughter was there, your husband, too, tangled amidst other Daughters, your so-called Sisters. In your real family you never had a sister. No brothers, either, although you wouldn't have minded one.

The minute your Sisters came into your life you understood what they wanted and why you had to go. Yet they somehow were the reason you didn't not want sisters for your daughter. You didn't like to think about what would've happened if the child you'd briefly carried were a girl. You would have had to find a way to get rid of it, and failing that, yourself.

Losing little Serach had been painful, physically. For a two days and a night you thought you'd never stop bleeding. Then, one afternoon, it did stop. You've been limping ever since.

You knew it would happen the moment you found out that you were rushing into it. The search for Nefertari was speeding up. You'd be in danger before you could give labor. Possibly dead.

And now you felt the entire responsibility sitting on your shoulders and excreting, knowing the fault will never leave you. But you yourself would be dead soon, so perhaps Allah would have mercy on you. Maybe for Nefertari, He would.

It was incredible how close you were to her, but by the looks of no throng alongside you, it was not yet time for her to glide out of her hiding place. Fate herself must've played a pretty good trick on you; no chance it was a coincidence. She wanted you to suffer grandly as in a tragic play and die right at the very center of her stage. After you saw just how boring life could be, even living in a thousands-year old land, you didn't blame her a bit. For there was some guilt snaking through your misery, your sorrow, that convinced you that you were faking a bit. You wanted to be here more than you ever wanted children.

You needed to die when no one was watching you. Where you could be free of senseless tears. You'd nearly wept when instructing your Sisters to inform your family your life had been smeared away by another automobile, for fear it would be true.

You wanted no ordinary death. In the midst of an entire life of belonging to someone else, you wanted to acknowledge the very moment you were being freed and clutch and hold it and laugh when listening to no one's voice in your ear. Not a Sister's.

Not Dine's.

Not Jamila's.

You liked them well enough.

But after a life in which no choice was yours, you needed a moment to yourself. You'd tied up all ends with them all.

You needed your death to be a dream.

For a long time you've been considering it, death and dreams. When the letter came, there was no out or hiding place, not even a solace when you knew your life was forfeit with any regard to your autonomy.

For you could not say no.

And up until now, dying seemed just fine.

After all, you got started young on loving death and kept at it.

Now you wish you hadn't.

The desire locked around you the moment you wished for it, and you would want nothing else for the rest of your days.

At times you thought you would, but then it came back. It always came back.

Death would put all this ridiculousness to an end. And so you had loved it.

Maybe part of what changed your mind now was the shrieking ache in your swollen tongue, the twisting in what now seemed to be every one of your muscles, the frequent deliriums it was harder and harder to wake up from. You saw nothing and felt everything.

But somewhere in the middle of it you wanted to hold your daughter one last time.

There she'd be, nestled right in the crook of your arm, that tiny space meant only for a nine-year-old girl.

Just then your teeth snapped together in response to fresh pain.

Suddenly your muscles were pulling and squeezing in every which way. The little energy keeping you upright expired.

The ground slammed up to your knees. Soon after it smacked your side and shoulder.

So much for dying standing, you thought grimly.

After a few seconds you felt your arms sliding under you, trying to push yourself back up.

You, Akila El Serach Umm Jamila, were struggling against the binds of death.

You, who have never fought anything in her life, were struggling against the very thing you thought you wanted most.

You took your father's name at one birth and your daughter's at another.

Yet you felt air on your hands where you might've felt their fingers.

The thought pulled at your chest, surprising you.

You didn't remember caring so much.

Then again, you knew better from years of experience.

Yet the daughter of Serach who read Quran passages with her own daughter seemed almost physically different from you—the dimmer, translucent form, the weaker image in your current double vision.

You wondered what your family would think when looking at you now. Torso bloated even farther than the child you had carried. Skin wrinkled and spotted beyond your thirty-nine years, malleable from dehydration. Color bronzing from eyes to skin to bone, so that against Nefertari's form you stood invisible, so like her that no one could see you. For a while in the middle of your stay you convinced yourself you would not die but rather fade into the pillars fully upright, working to find Nefertari for every moment you were conscious.

Little Jamila would be angry with you.

That is, she would still be angry with you. You didn't part on the best of terms, anyway. She thought you shouldn't be traveling in your condition.

You were against Dine telling Jamila about her new brother. She was too smart to miss the implications.

You knew the minute you found out that the baby wouldn't make it, not with a plane ticket out of Cairo practically in your hand.

You knew even if you managed to squeeze yourself out of the mess, he'd never make it. The search was far too rough.

Out of nowhere everything inside your body twisted. Every inch of your skin a Roman candle, so blinding you couldn't be sure about the seizing of your internal organs, although you thought you felt it.

You were still not sad. Fate had simply placed a dimmer over your life. When your throat knotted up, you fought it.

And as you lay dying, you believed. You believed in the magic between Ramses and Nefertari, and you believed, despite everything, that being here and dying here was right. You had to believe, for you would never allow yourself to lose your sanity over the possibility that thousands have swapped their lives for one dead, when Ramses after dying himself never remembered his wife to care to be beside her.

You humans have always been silly.

Feeling the movement of your eyelids became the only sign by which you could tell you were awake and not dreaming. Now they started fluttering again, and you could count the time between Nefertari and now in the length of your blinks.

You knew you'd fall out of coherency, slip into delusions before you left. Sometimes you were swept off to the desert, where you met yet another mirage. A few times you thought you were in the tomb with people dressed up in ancient costumes with thick eye makeup.

Or maybe they were the real thing.

Black started seeping into your vision. You were either dying or fainting. Which it was did not matter.

What did matter was this was the last time. Each time you returned you were less able to pluck reality from the strings of dreams. The only way you were able to tell was that you were alone. It held every experience together like glue. If you weren't alone, this was no longer your life.

And now you were really alone. Swatting at shadows above you whose names you knew but too weak to utter in anything but cries, repeating the process until you became so exhausted that even their names evaded you. They shared yours, you remembered that, but your own you have forgotten.

Fate was unkind again when she gave you a lucid moment, enough to encompass the awareness of your fate sevenfold.

 _You lost your life long ago, and now you want death to be all yours,_ she said, taking briefly the form of a Daughter, then the form of Nefertari who stepped on your thigh, rolling her foot over your brittle femur with a placid visage. _I'll have your death, too, because you don't remember, and now there is no more you, and thus not a thing to be yours._

Of course now would be the moment you realized that there were things you weren't quite ready to leave behind, like all the times Jamila came to you and held your hand on the longest days, or the way she was always so patient and fair with you from even before she could talk. The set line of her lips and hardness of her eyes reflected understanding.

You would miss so much. Even with her life forfeit, as yours was, you would miss her growing years.

She was already grown so much you were curious to see where it lead.

It was too late to tell her that you were sorry you couldn't be there to protect her when the Daughters arrived.

They all came back to you now, neither smiling nor frowning. Jamila stepped out of the mist of your vision, and the opacity and clearness of her image gave you sudden hope that she would survive.

Even your mostly-absent husband had a place when you remembered feeling the callouses of Dine's fingers brushing against your shoulders when he laid a blanket over them at evening time.

And it's here where you finally started to cry with all your might, your head falling onto your forearm into your sleeve as if it's always belonged there. Even this breath of free will was extinguished when you notice that there were no tears. It was just like another dream—a bad one. You lacked the energy to try to summon a drop of water from somewhere within you, and you had a feeling that it wasn't there anyhow.

Some deaths were practically an amber coating, claiming instantly the lives of faces swept clean of it, preserving a wide smile or influencing a dimple or a subtle nuance of the eyebrows. Some took just a little bit of life before skipping away, draining people enough to perhaps close their eyes.

And some took it all, lying across you so you couldn't move until you had turned to dust, until they could crumble you in their fists and extract life's final wheeze.

This one sucked all the life out of you, but somehow you were used to the pain. You've felt it all your life although you were sure you've never experienced dehydration before.

Curious, indeed.

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 **Didn't really edit this so I hope it doesn't suck. The letters in TMB are undoubtedly those of a Daughter, but for some reason I don't really get the feeling that Jamila's mom wrote them. It seems too easy somehow.**

 **Meaning of Akila's middle/surnames:**

 **Daughter of Serach, Mother of Jamila**

 **Egyptian women keep their fathers' names rather than changing to their husbands', generally, but some tack on the names of their children… so I thought that would be a nice touch.**

 **Jamila's last name indicates that her father's first name was Dine, since children take their fathers' first names as their middle/last names.**

 **I've found myself virtually unable to write as of late. My process for writing this was all over the place, which I take as my brain telling me it's time to take a break, so this is going to be my last story for a while. I may write a story for the new game, but that's not likely. More likely I'll play the new game over and over again and cry in spirit with the rest of the fandom** **over Lani's departure.**


End file.
